This thoughtful monograph calls attention to a previously overlooked aspect of relationships between confessional difference, collective memory and national identity in nineteenth-century Germany. Accounts of the era have long since moved beyond top-down, Prusso-centric political narratives to explore complex regional, social and cultural dynamics that informed as well as complicated the construction of nationhood before and after unification. In the process, scholars have paid considerable attention to historically inflected assumptions and practices that divided protestants from Catholics and sometimes from each other. While Stan Landry's study takes this work as a self-evident point of departure, it challenges a one-sided emphasis on confessional difference in the formation of the German national idea. Drawing on a generous sampling of contemporary pamphlet and periodical literature, Landry offers a “parallel history of German national unification” (100) that stresses the cumulative legacy of alternative ecumenical discourses, all of which in one way or another called for bridging confessional divides as a prerequisite to true national unity. He focuses on several major junctures at which ecumenical impulses were particularly active, bookended by the centennial observances of the Reformation in 1817 and 1917. In the land of Luther, he suggests, such projects implicitly entailed appeals to a usable common past, a Reformation narrative that could function as a unitive rather than divisive “site of memory” for the national community.

As the book makes clear, nineteenth-century German ecumenism was not a continuous or coherent movement but rather assumed widely divergent forms at different historical moments. In the afterglow of the Napoleonic Wars of Liberation, ecumenical initiatives enjoyed a fair degree of establishment support and were directed primarily towards repairing divisions within protestantism, reflected most notably in the union of Lutheran and Reformed churches in Prussia promulgated by Friedrich Wilhelm III in 1817. In the context of 1848, not surprisingly, ecumenism took on a more radical and anti-establishment character. Dissenting Catholics and protestants such as the renegade priest Johannes Ronge rejected ecclesiastical hierarchies and dogmatic discipline in the name of a revolutionary Luther. While failing to achieve their declared aim of launching a new nineteenth-century Reformation, self-styled “German Catholics” and “Protestant Friends” did succeed in creating a modest alternative to existing confessional milieux: most of the local groups they established during the Vormärz period came together in the 1850s to form an association of “Free Congregations” that largely eschewed confessional traditions in favor of a liberal humanism in which free inquiry took precedence over received doctrine. During the unification debates of the 1860s, by contrast, ecumenism became largely the cause of devôt reactionaries such the protestant editor Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach and the Catholic church historian Ignaz von Döllinger, a small band of whom met in Erfurt in 1860 to discuss prospects for reuniting the churches on the basis of the Augsburg Confession as part of a legitimist Christian-state alternative to what would become Bismarckian Realpolitik. Gerlach also participated in a later conservative endeavor, Ex Omnes Unum (discussed earlier by Landry in the pages of this journal). The outgrowth of an interconfessional devotional circle founded by an aristocratic protestant laywoman, Ex Omnes Unum worked to promote interconfessional peace in the face of the tendentious anti-Catholicism of the Kulturkampf era. Whereas the Erfurt circle could appeal to a shared image of Luther as pre-confessional Catholic reformer, the polarized atmosphere of the 1870s and the protestant triumphalism evident in the 1883 Luther quadricentenary inspired greater ambivalence among members of Ex Omnes Unum, some of whom were inclined to downplay the Reformer as an icon of national identity in favor of St. Boniface, the eighth-century “Apostle to the Germans.”

The book ends with a brief account of Reformation observances in 1917, held under the shadow of a collapsing war effort (and, though Landry does not mention it, the specter of collapsing home-front solidarity adumbrated by the Reichstag Peace Resolution three months earlier). On Landry's reading, this wartime mobilization of collective memory testified to the conclusive deconfessionalization of the national idea since the Kulturkampf, invoking as it did a shared narrative in which Luther could be celebrated as a German hero by protestant and Catholic alike. He therefore treats 1917 as a terminus ad quem of sorts for a specific trajectory of ecumenical nationalism that began in 1817. Advocates of ecumenism, he concludes, deserve credit for “having been instrumental in overcoming the political implications of [the confessional] divide” (111) and hence for making a significant contribution to long-term national unity. Based on the evidence presented here, much of that contribution appears to have been indirect or circumstantial. The book takes only passing note of other factors before and after 1917 that were arguably at least as important in re-casting confessional differences—for example, the growth of Social Democracy and its vocally anticlerical subculture, which at least implicitly raised the prospect of a new national divide between Christian Germany and its putative secular grave-diggers. That many national-minded Christians of both confessions were tempted to consign German Jews to the latter camp is another issue that receives only passing mention. None of this, however, detracts substantially from the value of Landry's findings. His book adds a useful dimension to recent analyses of both nationalism and religious identity in what Adolf Stoecker famously sought to baptize as the “Holy Protestant Empire of the German Nation.”